Red Hat is holding its annual customer summit in Boston this week, and today it announced a couple of enhancements to Ansible, its open-source IT automation tool. The new AI-fueled Lightspeed is at the core of these enhancements.
Distilling Complex Processes into Playbooks
At its core, Ansible’s process is about distilling complex processes into a playbook or recipe of actions. The next step in this process is building low-code and no-code workflows. With the recent rise of generative AI, it could potentially strip down this process even further to simply describing the task and letting the tool do the rest.
Introducing Lightspeed: A Generative AI-Driven Tool
Red Hat wants to achieve exactly that with Lightspeed, its new generative AI-driven tool being announced today. This tool is expected to come out later this year. According to Thomas Anderson, VP and GM for the Ansible business unit:
"We’re really focused with IBM in this use case specifically on Ansible automation, not just automation in general, but specifically the language of Ansible and automating using Ansible."
This approach is becoming increasingly common among enterprise companies, who are building more focused models geared specifically to their customers’ unique requirements. Red Hat is teaming up with its parent organization IBM to bring this generative AI product to market more quickly.
Watson Code Assistant for Ansible Lightspeed
When asked about the tool’s capabilities, Anderson explained:
"The Watson Code Assistant for Ansible Lightspeed uses IBM’s large language model that is trained on the breadth of the Ansible ecosystem, all of the playbooks, all of our own subject matter expertise, and the community contributing to it."
How Lightspeed Works
When a user describes a workflow, Lightspeed creates it based on the description. Further, it shows the sources of its work, so the IT pro checking the generated playbook can ensure that they can trust the sources before running it.
Enterprise Safety Features
Anderson also mentioned that there will be other features built with enterprise safety in mind when the enterprise version comes out later this year:
"We have this roadmap for Ansible Lightspeed with a public version everybody can use that helps us train the data model. And then later on this year, in October, we’ll be launching the enterprise version with IBM."
Closing the Skills Gap
Over time, the types of jobs IT pros have to do require broad levels of expertise. By putting generative AI to work on the problem, it could help close the skills gap:
"It means a subject matter expert can be far more productive, and on the other hand, you can bring in new people who don’t have to be Ansible experts in order to get going with Ansible and automation," Anderson said.
Availability
While open-source Ansible users won’t have access to a preview until later this year, an enterprise version could be available as soon as this fall.
